Indestructible (Indestructible Trilogy Book 1) (27 page)

“I’m not interested in any more of your sick experiments,” I say coldly. My insides hollow out.
Dying. I can’t be.

“So you aren’t curious about the link between a Pyro and their weapon? Why you feel such an attachment to this particular one?”

He reaches into a pocket inside his coat and withdraws a long dagger—
my dagger.

My hand shoots out automatically, but he pulls it out of range.

“Made of the ashes of fallen Pyros. It’s one of my proudest achievements.” His gaze darts between Cas and me, as though expecting a reaction. I refuse to let one show, but my heart’s beating fast again.
He made the weapons, too?

“But they have an inbuilt weakness. Ashes and blood—that was to be the original end of it, but as you know, Cas, blood can be used as a different kind of weapon.”

“The tattoos,” says Cas flatly. “So you want to have us heal people so you can bind them to your command. They disobey, they get blinding pain. I know how your mind works. But isn’t a bit excessive? Aren’t the tattoos enough?”

“There are other advantages. Well, if you’ve quite recovered from your injuries—I see the girl’s taken care of that—then we’d better get to work.”

“Not on your life.”

“No,” I say, quickly. “I want to see proof that you haven’t harmed my friends.”

Jared meets my eyes, curiosity sparking. “Have you no regard for your own life?”

“Are you going to show us or what?” Cas folds his arms. It’s amazing that he can still look so intimidating, even covered in blood and in the company of a lunatic who has both our lives in his hands.

“It won’t make any difference,” says Jared. He pushes open the door, and Cas stalks out.

Before I can follow, a loud screech echoes down the corridor. I start at how close it is.

“Where the hell did you put that fiend?” Cas demands. “Don’t tell me you locked it in your office.”

The one that attacked him?
Anger rushes over me and it’s all I can do not to leap at Jared.

But he’s frowning. “No, of course not. It’s outside, with the rest.”

Another screech. Definitely close by. And there’s another sound too, quieter, background noise. The rumble of ground moving.

A scream. Human.

“We’re being attacked?” Cas asks of no one in particular.

“No.” Jared shakes his head. “No, of course not. It can’t be.”

But that scream…

“Tell me what you did with my weapon,” Cas says. “Now.”

Jared’s still shaking his head. “No one can get in.
No one.”

“Yeah, well, we’re supposing they can. Do you have my knife?”

“In the lab, but…” Jared starts walking again, fast. Cas strides alongside him, close by, even though he’s unarmed. I rush after them, wondering if I can somehow steal my knife back from Jared. He’s not looking at me…

Then we round the corner, and a brutal sight hits my eyes.

Bodies. Several red-coated men and women lie motionless in the corridor, bodies marred with terrible wounds, even worse than Cas’s. Slash-marks, like the claws of a modified fiend.

Boom.

The walls shake. Plaster dust rains down, and the fluorescent light flickers and dies. An explosion shatters the left wall, and the biggest fiend I’ve ever seen shoves its way into the corridor.

It’s taller than the ceiling, twice my height and ten times my size, a creature of pure muscle. A boulder-like fist slams into the opposite wall, and bodies are trampled by its boat-sized feet. The giant turns to face us, as though it’s slow to realise it has living company.

“Hell,” Jared whispers.

“What have you done?” says Cas, backing away. I’ve never seen him run from a fight before.

“That’s not one of ours—never!” Jared turns tail and runs, and I follow, feet flying, one thought reverberating in my head—
get the knife.
As he halts at a dead end, I tackle him. Instinct takes over, and I lunge for the knife sticking out of his belt—
mine.
It melds to my hand almost instantly.

But can I kill that thing even with a weapon? I don’t know, and I’m not about to stick around and get cornered.

“Come on!” Cas lifts me to my feet and pulls me alongside him—I can barely register the shock that he’s not leaving me behind—but he’s weaponless, and the lumbering giant is on our heels.

We’re faster, though, and Cas knows where he’s going. He pulls me through corridor after winding corridor. It’s quiet, apart from the faint rumbling sounds and occasional fiend’s cry, but we don’t stop to check anyone’s alive here. Escape’s the only thing that matters.

Skidding around another corner, we almost run right into a barricade. A group of pale, terrified faces hide behind all kinds of weapons, and suddenly there are a dozen knives pointed at us.

“Get out of the way,” says Cas. “And if I were you, I’d get the hell out of here.”

“There’s no way out,” one of them says. “None.”

“Yes, and there’s a giant rampaging right behind us,” says Cas. “Can’t you hear it?”

The clatter of weapons falls into silence, and as if on cue, a tremendous
boom
makes the walls vibrate.

“I want my knife back,” says Cas. “So if you don’t mind,
get out of the way.”

And they do, quietly, without a fuss. Half the group flees in different directions, but I’m already running alongside Cas. He pushes open a door at the corridor’s end, and we run into a gigantic laboratory.

No time to take everything in. Cas gives the room a cursory glance and strides over to a table where his dagger lies flat, immersed in some kind of liquid. He pulls it out, sending the liquid flying everywhere.

“God knows what that is,” he mutters. “He could have tortured me with it, but decided to set his fiends on me instead. We can’t go out that way.” He nods to a door that I belatedly realise leads outside into some kind of yard. “That’s where he keeps his experiments.” He frowns, as though thinking. Urgency pulls at my feet, but I don’t know this place, and that monster’s still out there.

“This way,” he whispers, pushing open the door we came through, and I follow him into the corridor again.

How big is this place?
I can’t help wondering, as we run through corridor after corridor, seeing no signs of the destruction over the other side of the building. We run across a courtyard, and my heart lurches when I glance up and see winged shapes up in the sky.

“Come on.”

And finally we come to a pair of glass-windowed doors leading out into what looks like a junkyard. A high wall surrounds it, but Cas approaches it all the same.

“This is going to have to be fast, and we’ll need to run as soon as we get out. We’ll attract a bunch of attention, but there’s no other way.”

“What’s the plan?” I glance up at the sky again, but the dark shapes are behind us. They haven’t spotted us—yet.

“We’re going to bring the wall down. Both of us. On the count of three—you ready?”

I nod, hand gripping my dagger, though I know it won’t be much use for this, and readying myself to run.

“One… Two… Three.”

We run, hitting the wall at almost the exact same second with a
crash.
I reach inside for the power and feel the energy blast extending outwards, turning the brick wall to dust—but Cas takes my hand and the surge recedes, bringing me back to reality. I cough as I inhale brick dust.

“You okay?”

I nod, and we run.

Cracks spread out over the ground, and it vibrates beneath my feet. Whatever’s happening isn’t over yet. Cas makes for a patch of trees, shelter. Running alongside him, I keep glancing up at the sky, but it doesn’t tell me anything about what’s happening back there.

Or where that giant fiend came from.

We slow down as we reach the trees, turning back to the building. It looks deceptively calm, bar the destroyed wall we escaped through, but the shaking under my feet and the dark shapes in the sky tell me something’s very, very wrong.

“What now?” I ask. “We can’t go back there, but I don’t know how to get to the base. How can we stop him from hurting the others?”

“With luck, he’s dead,” says Cas. “If not, then he has bigger problems.”

“So where now?”

“This path leads to the main road. If we follow it, we can find out what’s happening over the other side. But I don’t want to leave you alone.”

“What, you think I want to stay behind?”

“Look, whatever’s out there isn’t something we can beat.
Nothing
gets past Jared’s security. He’s always kept this place protected. Which means the fiends have found a way to breach it. They’ll be coming for us, but they don’t know we’re here, which gives us a head start. If you run, you might reach Murray and the others in time to warn them, if they’ve got far enough away from the base.”

“But we’re miles away, right?” I was unconscious, but I’d assumed the winged fiends had carried us here.

Cas shakes his head. “For a Pyro, it’s walkable within a day.”

“So is that your plan? We go join Murray again?”

“I don’t know about you, but I have no intention of fighting for Jared, and I think this place is a lost cause. With the others, we’ll have strength in numbers. He doesn’t have as many of those fiends as he used to—not enough to make an army, anyway. I had a look,” he adds in response to my expression of confusion. “While you were unconscious. Of course, he wanted me back in his lab, so I pretended to go along with it. I know that place too well; it hasn’t changed much in the past few years. So I had a look at his latest experiments. Pretty much the same as before. Failed attempts at creating artificial Transcendents. But he’s not quit messing with the fiends, either.”

He reaches down to a knife-sheath on his boot and pulls out a test-tube of a thick, glistening reddish-brown liquid.

“I stole this. Not much of it left. He was playing around with DNA, too, but that was in the part of the building which that giant fiend rampaged through. There probably won’t be anything left now. That’s how he engineered the winged fiends, but judging by the ones we met on the road, I’d guess they weren’t as easy to control as he hoped.”

He flings the contents of the test tube at a nearby tree. The thick liquid splatters across the bark.

“He can’t use it now.”

Without his coat, the gaps in his black uniform stand out, slash-marks across his arms and chest. I realise I’m staring and quickly look away, back towards the building.

“That’s how the tattoos work,” he says, moving away, further into the woods. I hurry after him.

“Pyros share some kind of DNA coding that’s different from regular people,” he explains, “And he found a way to separate it and use it as a torture weapon. Anyone inked with one of those tattoos of his can be controlled at any time. He took blood samples from everyone when they arrived, so it was a simple matter of putting our blood into an object. It’s how he convinced so many Pyros to fight the fiends the first time around. You know, there were once at least five hundred of us.”

I feel dizzy. “Five hundred?”

“Or more. We lost half of them when the divide opened. Then Jared played his hand. He’d inked everyone in his secret inner circle. Then if anyone argued, he could convince them to do as he told them or suffer unbearable pain. Amazingly effective.”

I just gape at him. Even knowing what I do about Jared, the thought of him controlling that many people…
he’s a sadist. A genuine sadist.

“He only revealed it after the first attack, when it became clear the Fiordans’ weapons had us outmatched. We lost half our army. The Transcendent didn’t want to fight. I was the shield,” he says, dispassionately. “So I survived.”

“I…” I whisper. “He’s…”

“Yeah, he’s something else,” says Cas, his mouth pulled down in a grimace. “You might say being so close to the fiends cost him his sanity. He’s tried injecting himself with their blood before—if you haven’t guessed, he’s determined to create an invincible warrior. Seeing as his army failed the last time, he knows the key is the Transcendents. Like you.”

“Yeah, but I’m not exactly invincible,” I say, thinking of how easily he brought me down when our weapons touched. “So he was planning to make me into a monster, or just use my DNA? What about that giant? Is that his, too?”

More to the point, I can’t hear it anymore, which strikes me as ominous. Why is it so quiet?

“I’d say no. Even he has limits. It’s new, and I have a feeling it came from the divide. There’s no other way.”

Silence settles between us, and I become aware that we’ve unconsciously moved closer to one another. Without his coat, he looks… almost vulnerable. He blinks his pale blue eyes—why have I never noticed they were blue before?

“What?” he says, breaking the trance. I look away, my face flushing.

“Just wondering.” I scramble to remember what we were talking about. “About where that giant came from. Do you think there might have been another bridge opened?”